Amida-Buddha Scriptures and Buddhist Stupa

Buddhist stone scriptures from Shandong, China

This paper introduces the website of the Buddhist Stone Scriptures project of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Based on the TEI guidelines we store textual and visual data together with GIS information in a XML database. To access the inscriptions we provide visual tools like zoomable maps or Flashinterfaces as means of navigation. A special problem is the display of a single inscription, as...

Functional brain mapping during recitation of Buddhist scriptures and repetition of the Namu Amida Butsu: a study in experienced Japanese monks.

BACKGROUND The invocation Namu Amida Butsu (Nembutsu), voices the hope of rebirth into Amida's Pure Land. In the Nembutsu, Buddhists imagine that they are absorbed into Amida's Pure Land. Shiritori, a Japanese word chain game, is a common task used to activate language related regions in Japanese. The purpose of this study was to identify the regions activated during praying of the Namo Amida B...

Absence of the Buddha Image in Early Buddhist Art : Towards its Signifi - cance in Comparative

Journal of Buddhist Ethics 6 (1999): 219 In 1839, Robert Spence Hardy, Methodist missionary to what was then Ceylon, wrote The British Government and the Idolatry of Ceylon, a polemical pamphlet which accused the ruling British authorities of supporting a religion abhorrent to the mind of God because of its idolatry and Ògross superstitionsÓ (Hardy, 1839, p. 46). He was talking of Buddhism. Tha...

Reflection: Fire and Buddha Image

Gotama Buddha and Religious Pluralism

Buddhism currently enjoys the reputation of being one of the leading voices in a chorus that sings the praises of religious tolerance and perhaps even of pluralism. It is open to question, however, whether this reputation is deserved. The purpose of the present article is to examine whether the teachings of classical Buddhism have a contribution to make to the jubilation over religious pluralis...